What is hotlinking?
These days the Internet hides a lot of threats, from those that can break your computer to those that can steal your banking infos and therefore your life savings. But there are also threats that can hurt your business, one of these being hotlinking in its more common form: image hotlinking.
What is image hotlinking
It’s a common technique to display images on a website which are embedded from other websites. The result: you get the traffic, the other site gets its bandwidth stolen. Why is that hurting your business? Well, when you start a small website (like almost online business does) you pay some hosting service for server space on its hard drives and a monthly bandwidth. If you exceed any one of them you can’t upload any files anymore and any visitor that visits your website gets a message that your bandwidth was exceeded.
How to protect myself from image hotlinking
I’m planning on writing an article about this, but if you’re already here I’ll give you some links which show various ways to protect yourself from image hotlinking:
- .htaccess method – more complex and needs some knowledge, but it’s stronger
- cpanel hotlinking protection – it’s not that safe as it can interfere with your websites but it’s easier to use. Only works with websites that are hosted in a cpanel environment
- image hotlinking checker – see if your images are protected or not
